Skincare Brand Right-Sizes Transport Packaging Across a 60-SKU Line

An 8% l-mandelic serum from Face Reality ships in a 30-mL tube. A sal-C toner for a professional treatment room ships in a 473-mL bottle. A clear skin peel comes in a dark glass jar. All three can travel in the same case to the same customer, which means one case and one packing method have to protect items that differ by more than tenfold in volume and weight.

That range exists because of who Face Reality sells to. The brand distributes through licensed skincare professionals rather than through retail, so a single order can carry both the large-format products an esthetician uses in a treatment room and the smaller products that esthetician’s client takes home. And every order is different, bespoke to the practioner. That’s why the acne brand spent the past several years working on a problem that had less to do with how its bottles and tubes look on a shelf, and more to do with what happens to them after they leave the building.

Kate Kollerer, chief operations and technology officer at Face Reality, has spent that time rethinking where the burden of protection actually sits.Face Reality sells through licensed skincare professionals rather than retail, so a single order can stock a treatment room and supply an esthetician's clients at the same time.Face Reality

Two businesses, one catalog

The professional channel, made up of estheticians, dermatologists, and med spas, is why the catalog runs well over 60 SKUs, split between products the consumer uses at home and the larger-format “backbar” products a professional works with in a treatment room.

It also gives the company two fundamentally different order profiles. Professionals stock their shelves through conventional B2B replenishment, sometimes in full case packs, sometimes palletized. But Face Reality also supports drop shipping, where a professional places an order that ships directly to their client.

"We have a very wide range of orders that vary from one to two items to orders that literally need to get palletized," Kollerer says. Finding a fulfillment partner who could handle both was a gating requirement, and it is what led the company to ALOM, the Fremont, Calif.-based supply chain services provider.Best-sellers are sold here, but volumes among the 60-plus SKUs range from a 30-mL serum to a 473-mL backbar bottle, and mixed orders routinely combine both.Face Reality

Packaging design stays close to home

Kollerer does not use the standard tier vocabulary of pakcaging. "I think of packaging not just as primary or secondary, but I also think about it on the shipment side of the house," she says.

Like a lot of companies in its category, Face Reality does not run its own packaging operation. Filling and primary packaging sit with long-standing co-man/co-pack partners. But the specification work stays inside the brand, and Kollerer is emphatic that it is not a downstream activity.

"Packaging is not an afterthought. It's really part of our product development cycle," she says. The company completed a full line redesign about three years ago, and it carries both OTC and cosmetic products, which puts regulatory constraints directly into the design conversation.

Packaging choices at Face Reality are also constrained by how much the finished product can sell for, which is unusual in prestige skincare. What the brand pays a contract manufacturer for a tube or bottle feeds directly into the shelf price, and the company has deliberately capped how high that price can go.

"One of the things that really sets us apart is the idea of accessibility," Kollerer says. "We know acne affects everyone, not just specific socioeconomic brackets or certain budgets."

That ceiling limits how far the brand can move toward heavier glass, thicker walls, or added components.

The result is a primary packaging program that is deliberately restrained. The line is dropper-free. It leans on pumps, airless tubes, a flip-cap toner and, as of this year, the brand's first spray format. Very few SKUs carry a folding carton at all.

"Most products will be in a tube or in a bottle, and we're able to work with our product development and our quality teams to make sure that we're fully [OTC] compliant, but without a whole lot of unnecessary secondary packaging," Kollerer says. The same discipline applies to products that don't exist yet.

"We have a pretty strong bias to stay within the types of packaging that we're already leveraging, because we have a lot of data on them," she says. Reusing a proven tube or bottle buys visual cohesiveness on a treatment room shelf, but it also buys known transit behavior. When the spray was still an idea, the brand was already asking its fulfillment partners a blunt question: "I'm not investing in something that will fundamentally break your processes, am I?"A Ranpak dispenser expands die-cut kraft into a honeycomb structure with a tissue interleaf, replacing bubble wrap and, in many orders, an inner carton.ALOM

The overpacking trap

None of that discipline solves the size problem. It arguably exacerbates it, because a catalog of bare tubes and bottles with minimal secondary packaging, going through what works like the e-comm channel, is a catalog of items that have to be protected somewhere else.

"When you're packing small-scale products that are less than an ounce in the same case with large-format products that may come in a very heavy bottle, with packaging glass containers, that's not an easy thing to fix," Kollerer says. "The natural thing is to overpackage and overprotect, and that becomes really wasteful and quite expensive in the long run."

But in effect, that’s where the operation had landed prior to working with ALOM. Fragile items went into bubble wrap. Mixed orders sometimes went into an inner carton, which then went into an outer case. Packaging ran larger than the contents required.

The mechanism driving it was not carelessness. It was discretion and a tendency to err towards overprotection.

"Prior to this, it was driven by the picker," says Fiona Lowbridge, chief commercial officer at ALOM. "You've got somebody that's trying to do the right thing for the right reasons, which everybody is. And then they're grabbing extra dunnage or they're putting extra product. They're making their own decisions to protect the product, but those are subjective."

Moving the decision upstream

The fix was to stop treating carton and case selection as something that happens at the pack station.

ALOM ran a dimensional exercise across the catalog, measuring and cubing every item. Order history then told the system what it actually needed to accommodate. Thie considered, among other metrics, average units per order, the highest-velocity items, and configurations that recur. That analysis produced a working set of four to six box configurations.

Now, the order profile, not the picker, determines the shipper. "The system is making that determination once it knows what the order is and the order size, and that will dictate then before the product even gets out to the picker," Lowbridge says. The box is identified, staged and barcode-labeled before picking begins, so the picker works into a carton that has already been chosen for the order.

Eliminating subjective discretion did something beyond right-sizing, she adds. It made the program measurable and repeatable. With a known case for a known order profile, damage data becomes a test of the algorithm rather than a test of who packed that day.

The void fill changed at the same time. Bubble wrap gave way to Ranpak's Geami WrapPak, a die-cut kraft that expands into a honeycomb structure as it leaves the dispenser, paired with a tissue interleaf that faces the container so the honeycomb does not mar it. A packer can wrap and separate items of very different weights inside a single box, and the kraft is curbside recyclable.

"We have to have a solution that's going to keep that separate within the same box, but not ship air, because we don't want to be doing that either," Lowbridge says.New professional partners receive a fully branded mailer printed inside and out — an intentional exception to a shipping program otherwise built around unbranded boxes and branded tape.Face Reality

What changed

Face Reality is careful about attributing improvement to any single initiative, and Kollerer prefers to talk about the changes she can point to directly. Cases were downsized and matched to the order profile, two packaging components were eliminated by the switch to the honeycomb wrap, product is co-packed into a single shipper rather than nested in an inner carton, and fewer orders are being split across multiple cases.

The framing she applies is the one packaging engineers will recognize from their own capital requests. "Sustainability improvements are most meaningful when they work both operationally and financially," she says. "If you do one at the expense of the other, you're probably creating another problem instead of solving for both."

Cutting packaging did not mean entirely giving up nicely branded shippers. New professional partners receive a welcome box printed on both faces—white outside, slate blue inside—and filled with paper shred rather than the honeycomb wrap that carries the rest of the network. It is a deliberate exception, and one where Kollerer concedes there is some waste. Replenishment orders, which carry the bulk of the volume, ship in an unbranded case closed with branded tape. "It creates a little bit of that personalized experience to our brand without slapping our logo on every side," she says.

Lot-level traceability is a separate requirement the packing operation has to meet. Products carry a barcode, lot information, and expiration dating where applicable, and the brand needs lot-level tie-back from a specific unit to a specific order. ALOM manages that systematically, tracking by lot, batch, or serial number so that a hypothetical recall can be narrowed rather than run wholesale.

The takeaway

Kollerer's advice to brand owners approaching the same inflection point is to spec for the company they are becoming, not the one they are.

"Sometimes it makes a lot of sense to invest upfront to make sure that you're not reworking your packaging and rebranding every other year," she says. "In the professional space, consistency really matters."

And she rejects the framing that puts any of this behind the curtain. "I really don't think of supply chain as a solely behind-the-scenes consideration," she says. "It's really core to our customer experience and to our company's ability to grow and scale."

"Operations should create confidence, not complexity."